Observations
Why Good Products Fail Due to Poor Presentation An analysis for techies and marketers.
The history of IT is filled with brilliant but failed products. The technologically superior Betamax lost to the simpler, cheaper VHS. Google Wave, an advanced messenger that was ahead of its time, died without ever reaching mass adoption. The list goes on and on.
Technical specialists feel frustrated every time they see examples like this. The market seems illogical, as users often choose the worst option because they cannot appreciate technological elegance. However, the reason for failure almost never lies in the code or architecture itself. Rather, it lies in the delivery system of this technology to the end user. In what we call “presentation.”
Poor presentation is not just about ugly slides. Rather, it is about a broken pipeline through which your product’s value must travel to reach the customer. This pipeline consists of marketing, sales, onboarding, and the user interface.
In this article, we will approach this topic from an engineering perspective, breaking down this pipeline into four key layers to identify where systemic failures most often occur—failures that can destroy even the best product.
Layer 1: Marketing that speaks for itself.
This is the first and most important stage of the pipeline. If it fails here, the client will never progress to the next stages. The goal of this layer is to answer the potential buyer’s core question: “What is this, and why do I need it?”
Marketing fails when it does not perform its primary function as a translator between technical advantages and business value. Instead, marketing either repeats the technical terminology provided by developers or uses its own “marketing language,” which only marketing understands.
Imagine your team developed a breakthrough predictive analytics algorithm for warehouse inventory management. Technically, it is marvelous. However, your website and ads say: “An innovative machine learning platform using LSTM neural network models.”
A competing CTO might appreciate it. However, your actual buyers, the logistics or financial directors, simply close the tab. They don’t understand how it solves their business problem.
The “translation” should have been: “A system that predicts demand and reduces storage costs for excess inventory by X%.” This message is not about what you did, but how it benefits the customer in terms of their P&L.
When marketing talks to itself or to developers instead of to the market, your brilliant product becomes invisible. The market cannot buy what it cannot understand. This is the most common cause of good products failing.
Layer 2: Sales That Create Friction Instead of Value
Imagine your marketing worked perfectly. It conveyed your value and attracted the attention of the right customers, who clicked on the “Learn More” or “Try It” button. They then move on to the next stage of the process, which is the sales department’s responsibility. Here, a new minefield may await them.
A well-built sales process aims to be fast and nearly imperceptible, like a well-oiled machine that minimizes friction on the customer’s journey to the product. But often, the opposite happens.
A client may want to try the product, but instead of seeing “Start trial,” they see “Book a demo.” They want pricing information, but they see “Contact us for a quote” instead of a price list. Rather than allowing clients to quickly express their interest, companies create artificial barriers that force them to qualify through a sales manager. Many clients drop off immediately.
Another form of friction is when the seller is incompetent with the product. When the client asks a basic technical question, the manager promises to “check with engineering.” This undermines trust. Clients don’t want their questions relayed; they want to speak with an expert. Each time a seller interrupts the developers, engineering time is burned and it is signaled that the company has no internal knowledge delivery system.
As a result, even the most “warmed up” and targeted customer, attracted by perfect marketing, may simply get tired of buying. They will expend so much energy resisting your sales process that they won’t have the energy left to evaluate the product itself. Once again, your IT team’s value has not reached its intended audience.
Layer 3: Onboarding: The “Valley of Death” for Users
Marketing and sales have worked. The client has crossed all barriers, paid money (or started a trial), and entered the product for the first time. Hope is high. But many strong IT products fail at this final stage. Welcome to onboarding.
What does the user see? Most often, a blank screen. They see a complex interface with dozens of menus and buttons, none of which are self-explanatory. There are no training tips, demo data, or welcome emails to guide them. They are left alone with all the power and complexity of your system.
By this point, the user feels less like a savvy professional who has discovered a useful tool and more like an idiot who can’t figure out the interface. It’s a terrible feeling. The easiest thing for them to do is to close the tab and never come back, dismissing the money or time spent as a bad experience.
All the elegance of your backend architecture and database optimizations crash into an absence of thoughtful first-user experience. Time to value becomes infinite. For the client, that is equivalent to a product that does not work.
Successful onboarding is a designed process, not an accident. As a technical leader, you must work with designers to ensure that the path to your product’s “magic” is as short and clear as possible.
Layer 4: UX/UI – The “Face” of Your Backend
It may be unpleasant to hear, but for 99% of your users, the interface is the product. They will never see the beauty of your code or appreciate the elegance of the architecture. They won’t marvel at the speed of the database, either. They only interact with the buttons, forms, and menus on the screen.
They judge the entire “organism” based on the quality of its “face.” Even if the problem lies in an unoptimized front end rather than the back end, a slow-loading interface creates the impression that the entire product is sluggish. An illogical button layout makes users think that the product is poorly designed. An outdated design tells users that the software is old and abandoned.
Even if your backend can process a million transactions per second, if the “Pay” button is hard to find or doesn’t work the first time, your product isn’t fulfilling its main function from the user’s point of view. All of your server farm’s power is rendered useless because of one incorrectly designed button.
Therefore, close collaboration between the IT team, UX/UI designers, and front-end developers is not a matter of taste; it’s a matter of preserving and communicating the value of your work. A poor interface acts as a “noisy communication channel” that distorts and devalues the flawless signal coming from your backend.
The product is The Entire System
After reviewing the four layers of “presentation,” one clear conclusion emerged. The success of a technological product is a multiplicative function, not an additive one.
The formula for success looks like this: Value = Core Tech x Marketing x Sales x Onboarding x UX.
If even one of the multipliers approaches zero, the final result is zero. This is true even if your Core Tech is a perfect 10 out of 10.
This is why a modern CTO or IT director cannot afford to live only in the world of code and servers. They must be one of the key guardians of the entire value delivery system. They must build bridges with the marketing team to ensure that value is translated correctly and work closely with designers to prevent the user experience from diminishing the value of engineering achievements.
View your product as a systemic representation of your entire business. Where is the weakest link in your value delivery system? What is the main “multiplier equal to zero” today?
Discuss this with not only developers but also your colleagues from marketing, sales, and design. Perhaps your biggest growth opportunity lies there, rather than in refactoring another module.
